6 ms·

Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people’s minds

80 points by wyem 3y ago

mensetmanusman 3y ago
“We take very seriously the concerns that it could be used for bad purposes and have worked to avoid that,” Tang said. “We want to make sure people only use these types of technologies when they want to and that it helps them.” This will obviously be abused decades from now. Why wouldn’t authoritarians listen in on brains that have trained transformer models based on forced textual consumption over years.
- echelon 3y ago
  Just like we pay people money to sing for us, we'll pay people money to dream for us. The best dreamers and imagineers will sell their distilled thoughts for the rest of us to consume. We'll have an indie scene. We'll share them on internet platforms. Remix them. There's so much more good that will come from this than bad.
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    Yeah, like get this, when the world is turning to shit because of climate change and we're forced to live underground like rats, we can all collectively hallucinate what the world used to be like. It'll be grand. You'll be hallucinating, I'll be hallucinating, the AI'll be hallucinating too. "His older work was much better," ChatGPT will proclaim. "... what older work?"
    - echelon 3y ago
      > the world is turning to shit By most objective measures, this is false. More people are being lifted out of poverty than ever before. People are also less bored, more creative, and more productive. > because of climate change Hasn't happened yet. Barring a runaway effect, it looks like we'll have fewer species (lamentable) but more arable land. We're still in an ice age and we're nowhere close to Cretaceous climate. We're closer to inventing transcendent intelligence than killing it off completely. > forced to live underground like rats This is just vivid imagination. We're not Morlocks.
      - hammyhavoc 3y ago
        `Warning: sense of humour failure. Please insert more coffee. Error code: 8008`
      - anigbrowl 3y ago
        > Just like we pay people money to sing for us, we'll pay people money to dream for us. The best dreamers and imagineers will sell their distilled thoughts for the rest of us to consume. [unpleasant thought] > This is just vivid imagination. The progression above is why I regard your vision of imagination as a consumer good so immediately off-putting. It's all glitz and glamor until you encounter an idea you don't like, and then you're immediately dismissive of it.
        echelon 3y ago
        > It's all glitz and glamor until you encounter an idea you don't like, It's called defeatism. I think it's a sad way to spend our short ~60-80 years as temporarily thinking matter in a brilliant and infinite cosmos. Downer dispositions suck the wonder and awe right out of the air. Work. Build. Grow. If you have a complaint, throw yourself at the problem and fix it. Or maybe the problem isn't so big relative to the opportunity cost and the short scale of our lives.
        anigbrowl 3y ago
        I call that hypocrisy. You sound like a marketing person.
        echelon 3y ago
        Every night I'm building. I comment on HN as I wait for CI.
      - chimprich 3y ago
        > but more arable land. This is dangerously fantastical thinking. Global heating gives us less arable land. It becomes harder to grow crops as the temperature increases. This is a much bigger negative effect than any positive effect from CO2 increases. A lot of current arable land in the tropics will become unusable. Or are you thinking of growing crops in recently-defrosted tundra in Siberia? In which case, how are you going to get political agreement to grow stuff there, get high enough soil quality, irrigate it, and move all the farmers from, say, India to there to work it?
    - vasco 3y ago
      > we're forced to live underground like rats, we can all collectively hallucinate what the world used to be like How do you know we aren't already? Someone might've invented this already and you might be living in your pod already hallucinating a full human experience from years ago. Similar concept to "the universe is a simulation" meme.
    - lynx23 3y ago
      In a world where almost every country has an arsenal of weapons, you are afraid of climate change? But yeah, that seems to be the new nemesis for a certain generation. Anyway, your post reminded me of the "The Futurological Congress" by Lem.
      - hammyhavoc 3y ago
        Yes, I live on the coast, but even folks who don't live directly on a coastline can be affected negatively by failed crops and displaced people. The coast land in Guyana is currently below sea-level, and the sea level is rising further. I've worked on a documentary about the effects of coastal erosion in Guyana, which won the 2020 Godrey Chin Heritage Journalism 1st prize. You can see the trailer as well as the complete documentary over on https://hammyhavoc.com/audio-post-production-for-coast-land-2020/ https://hammyhavoc.com/audio-post-production-for-coast-land-... Will check it out! Also got Neal Stephenson's Anathem recommended earlier. I had no idea how many people on HN read SF! :- )
  - bob_boblaw 3y ago
    isn't that what movies are. an escape from reality. and the good ones get awards and money?
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    Sounds revolting, fail to see how you could possibly imagine this as a 'good' outcome.
- walderf 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    You can't just leave it at that and not get on a throwaway and whistleblow.
    - whitemary 3y ago
      I don't think you know what whistleblowing is. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistleblower https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistleblower
      - hammyhavoc 3y ago
        It's exactly what I know it to be. What I don't know is what your point actually is. The comment hinted at foul play with a technology that is completely world-changing then nips it in the bud like it was NBD.
        makk 3y ago
        Yeah. We need to hook the commenter up to an fmri and transformer model to understand what they are thinking.
    - walderf 3y ago
      i posted a couple links in a top level comment. i didn't rezlize you replied, otr i would have done it here. can't go on alt, now. it's just a little light reading. unless it's happening in such a way that you know it's happening, you wouldn't believe it. if you're, let's say, able to read what's not there but actually really right there, then.... yeah. also. you don't want it to happen to you. it will happen to everyone, maybe, eventually. just need everyone to know it is. then we need these people, people who are medical professionals with a strong moral and ethical code, like some of the ones who have posted 10, 15 years ago, worried about this happening "soon" back then.... well it's now, and, well, nothing's been done. i doubt it can be, yet, either. basically. your brain is like... a computer with storage. your memories are like... replays of what happened. stored. forever. it's accessed. perused. i don't know the full extent. it's not "minor" or shoulder-shrugging, by any means. it's pretty fucked, if you know it's happening. if you don't, then, well..... that's good for you. the problem is.... it doesn't end with just being able to access memories. your... well your brain controls your body. your arms. your senses. your legs. your.... organs. so. if you don't know it's happening, then, you're good, right? that's all i have for now.
- vixen99 3y ago
  And the list of those authoritarians is very long indeed. None of them would want to be left behind.
appletrotter 3y ago
I'd take this over being water boarded.
- selcuka 3y ago
  False dichotomy much?
- walderf 3y ago
  no, you wouldn't. you know where the water is coming from. you know it's water. oh. they don't need the fancy machine to interface. it's remote. they reply. you don't know where it comes from, either. or who. trust me. you don't want to know what it's like.
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    What are you even talking about? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-023-01304-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-023-01304-9 It's fMRI, there's nothing remote about it.
    - walderf 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - flangola7 3y ago
        Did you seriously just link the Wikipedia articles for... microwaves and the EM spectrum? In one sentence, what is the concrete point you are making?
        walderf 3y ago
        i did. it reads as a story if you ignore everything before the first single "/" and read the title, which has a handy link to anyone wanting more info about it, because i am a nice guy, instead of asking such a question. as far as summing it up, well, you can read what i have posted here to figured it out, if you really want to know more.
walderf 3y ago
[flagged]
- readthenotes1 3y ago
  Related is the recently posted article that said aluminum foil hats actually magnify the signal in certain frequencies frequented by the US government
  - walderf 3y ago
    [flagged]
valine 3y ago
If this is possible with just from measuring blood flow imagine what we could extrapolate from electrodes implanted deep in the brain.
devsda 3y ago
For now the system has to be trained per person. Is the difference in brain activity across individuals significant enough to stop building a universal model? It is not clear whether this is language dependent or not. If it is, I hope being bilingual or multilingual is a viable defense against this technology.
- sjducb 3y ago
  Obviously this is pure speculation, but I suspect it'll be a lot like cloning someone's voice. The first systems required the participant to read thousands of lines of text. Now you can do it over a phone call without the participant noticing that you're cloning their voice.
- sycamoretrees 3y ago
  Why would bilingualism be a defense? Try throwing ChatGPT or whatever a line which combines several languages. e.g., If you ask it “¿Quel est the resultado of 四*6.1, in inglese?”, it will probably reply “4 times 6.1 equals 24.4.” I suppose AI doesn’t think in words, but expects bits of information to be related to X meaning, and from there it can predict a reply and translate that information into words we understand. I haven’t tried the above line, but if it’s not possible already there’s nothing really stopping us from making it work soon enough. Edit: sorry, maybe I’m misunderstanding. Are you talking more about multilingual people thinking more abstractly, which would make it harder to tie information to any specific words?
6451937099 3y ago
[dead]
stolen_biscuit 3y ago
This is terrifying
Claude_Shannon 3y ago
So not even your mind would be safe. If true, everyone who took part in it should be tried as terrorists for crimes against humanity and never see the light again.
hungryforcodes 3y ago
“For a noninvasive method, this is a real leap forward compared to what’s been done before, which is typically single words or short sentences,” Huth said. “We’re getting the model to decode continuous language for extended periods of time with complicated ideas.” Thats pretty scary. Who would work on this? Refine this and in 10 years put it into wifi base stations that scan everything and you can read the thoughts of anyone in a room. Auto scan for "dangerous" keywords and voila: automated police state!
- hnbad 3y ago
  What people tend to forget about these dystopias is that dystopias are distributed unequally. For some people the police is already going to stop you randomly and may randomly end up killing you. Some people will already spend extensive time being searched and questioned if they want to take a flight. Some people will already be automatically rejected before anyone has actually read their qualifications or interviewed them. The US is already a police state. The police uses military grade equipment and vehicles. They can literally get away with murder in many cases. They can rob you in open daylight, legally. They can arrest you for no crime, detain you and then dump you in the middle of nowhere. They can shoot out your eyes by directly firing rubber bullets (which are supposed to be deflected off surfaces) straight on. And if you end up in prison, you can be forced into indentured servitude. Of course this is an exaggeration because all these things don't happen to all the people, but that's the point. Concerns about thought crime are just concerns that the apparatus could be aimed at you, too, when you've been less affected so far. The concern shouldn't be for whom it is aimed at but for the scope, scale and supposed necessity of apparatus itself. The problem isn't that we might oppress the wrong people, the problem is that we think we need oppression.
- ErikBjare 3y ago
  Good luck putting an fMRI machine in a wifi base station.
- soco 3y ago
  There's also an in-between status: put in the airports, police stations, tribunals, at the bank entrance, at wedding ceremonies or in churches... the fact that the scientist mentions their worries doesn't make any of that avoidable.
hnbad 3y ago
If this is trained to detect language in your brain, I wonder how this fares with people like me who lack a clear "inner voice" (or "inner monologue"). I don't doubt that it can be trained on a brain to detect that brain's patterns but given how different human brains can be in many ways, I'm inclined to believe this won't be turned into a "universal brain reader" so easily.
layer8 3y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33038452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33038452
- cbolton 3y ago
  Thanks, that one points to the bioRxiv version of the paper which is freely available while the news piece submitted here links to a paywall.

80 points by wyem 3y ago

“We take very seriously the concerns that it could be used for bad purposes and have worked to avoid that,” Tang said. “We want to make sure people only use these types of technologies when they want to and that it helps them.” This will obviously be abused decades from now. Why wouldn’t authoritarians listen in on brains that have trained transformer models based on forced textual consumption over years.

echelon 3y ago
Just like we pay people money to sing for us, we'll pay people money to dream for us. The best dreamers and imagineers will sell their distilled thoughts for the rest of us to consume. We'll have an indie scene. We'll share them on internet platforms. Remix them. There's so much more good that will come from this than bad.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  Yeah, like get this, when the world is turning to shit because of climate change and we're forced to live underground like rats, we can all collectively hallucinate what the world used to be like. It'll be grand. You'll be hallucinating, I'll be hallucinating, the AI'll be hallucinating too. "His older work was much better," ChatGPT will proclaim. "... what older work?"
  - echelon 3y ago
    > the world is turning to shit By most objective measures, this is false. More people are being lifted out of poverty than ever before. People are also less bored, more creative, and more productive. > because of climate change Hasn't happened yet. Barring a runaway effect, it looks like we'll have fewer species (lamentable) but more arable land. We're still in an ice age and we're nowhere close to Cretaceous climate. We're closer to inventing transcendent intelligence than killing it off completely. > forced to live underground like rats This is just vivid imagination. We're not Morlocks.
    - hammyhavoc 3y ago
      `Warning: sense of humour failure. Please insert more coffee. Error code: 8008`
    - anigbrowl 3y ago
      > Just like we pay people money to sing for us, we'll pay people money to dream for us. The best dreamers and imagineers will sell their distilled thoughts for the rest of us to consume. [unpleasant thought] > This is just vivid imagination. The progression above is why I regard your vision of imagination as a consumer good so immediately off-putting. It's all glitz and glamor until you encounter an idea you don't like, and then you're immediately dismissive of it.
      - echelon 3y ago
        > It's all glitz and glamor until you encounter an idea you don't like, It's called defeatism. I think it's a sad way to spend our short ~60-80 years as temporarily thinking matter in a brilliant and infinite cosmos. Downer dispositions suck the wonder and awe right out of the air. Work. Build. Grow. If you have a complaint, throw yourself at the problem and fix it. Or maybe the problem isn't so big relative to the opportunity cost and the short scale of our lives.
        anigbrowl 3y ago
        I call that hypocrisy. You sound like a marketing person.
        echelon 3y ago
        Every night I'm building. I comment on HN as I wait for CI.
    - chimprich 3y ago
      > but more arable land. This is dangerously fantastical thinking. Global heating gives us less arable land. It becomes harder to grow crops as the temperature increases. This is a much bigger negative effect than any positive effect from CO2 increases. A lot of current arable land in the tropics will become unusable. Or are you thinking of growing crops in recently-defrosted tundra in Siberia? In which case, how are you going to get political agreement to grow stuff there, get high enough soil quality, irrigate it, and move all the farmers from, say, India to there to work it?
  - vasco 3y ago
    > we're forced to live underground like rats, we can all collectively hallucinate what the world used to be like How do you know we aren't already? Someone might've invented this already and you might be living in your pod already hallucinating a full human experience from years ago. Similar concept to "the universe is a simulation" meme.
  - lynx23 3y ago
    In a world where almost every country has an arsenal of weapons, you are afraid of climate change? But yeah, that seems to be the new nemesis for a certain generation. Anyway, your post reminded me of the "The Futurological Congress" by Lem.
    - hammyhavoc 3y ago
      Yes, I live on the coast, but even folks who don't live directly on a coastline can be affected negatively by failed crops and displaced people. The coast land in Guyana is currently below sea-level, and the sea level is rising further. I've worked on a documentary about the effects of coastal erosion in Guyana, which won the 2020 Godrey Chin Heritage Journalism 1st prize. You can see the trailer as well as the complete documentary over on https://hammyhavoc.com/audio-post-production-for-coast-land-2020/ https://hammyhavoc.com/audio-post-production-for-coast-land-... Will check it out! Also got Neal Stephenson's Anathem recommended earlier. I had no idea how many people on HN read SF! :- )
- bob_boblaw 3y ago
  isn't that what movies are. an escape from reality. and the good ones get awards and money?
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  Sounds revolting, fail to see how you could possibly imagine this as a 'good' outcome.
walderf 3y ago
[flagged]
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  You can't just leave it at that and not get on a throwaway and whistleblow.
  - whitemary 3y ago
    I don't think you know what whistleblowing is. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistleblower https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistleblower
    - hammyhavoc 3y ago
      It's exactly what I know it to be. What I don't know is what your point actually is. The comment hinted at foul play with a technology that is completely world-changing then nips it in the bud like it was NBD.
      - makk 3y ago
        Yeah. We need to hook the commenter up to an fmri and transformer model to understand what they are thinking.
  - walderf 3y ago
    i posted a couple links in a top level comment. i didn't rezlize you replied, otr i would have done it here. can't go on alt, now. it's just a little light reading. unless it's happening in such a way that you know it's happening, you wouldn't believe it. if you're, let's say, able to read what's not there but actually really right there, then.... yeah. also. you don't want it to happen to you. it will happen to everyone, maybe, eventually. just need everyone to know it is. then we need these people, people who are medical professionals with a strong moral and ethical code, like some of the ones who have posted 10, 15 years ago, worried about this happening "soon" back then.... well it's now, and, well, nothing's been done. i doubt it can be, yet, either. basically. your brain is like... a computer with storage. your memories are like... replays of what happened. stored. forever. it's accessed. perused. i don't know the full extent. it's not "minor" or shoulder-shrugging, by any means. it's pretty fucked, if you know it's happening. if you don't, then, well..... that's good for you. the problem is.... it doesn't end with just being able to access memories. your... well your brain controls your body. your arms. your senses. your legs. your.... organs. so. if you don't know it's happening, then, you're good, right? that's all i have for now.
vixen99 3y ago
And the list of those authoritarians is very long indeed. None of them would want to be left behind.

appletrotter 3y ago

I'd take this over being water boarded.

selcuka 3y ago
False dichotomy much?
walderf 3y ago
no, you wouldn't. you know where the water is coming from. you know it's water. oh. they don't need the fancy machine to interface. it's remote. they reply. you don't know where it comes from, either. or who. trust me. you don't want to know what it's like.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  What are you even talking about? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-023-01304-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-023-01304-9 It's fMRI, there's nothing remote about it.
  - walderf 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - flangola7 3y ago
      Did you seriously just link the Wikipedia articles for... microwaves and the EM spectrum? In one sentence, what is the concrete point you are making?
      - walderf 3y ago
        i did. it reads as a story if you ignore everything before the first single "/" and read the title, which has a handy link to anyone wanting more info about it, because i am a nice guy, instead of asking such a question. as far as summing it up, well, you can read what i have posted here to figured it out, if you really want to know more.

walderf 3y ago

[flagged]

readthenotes1 3y ago
Related is the recently posted article that said aluminum foil hats actually magnify the signal in certain frequencies frequented by the US government
- walderf 3y ago
  [flagged]

valine 3y ago

If this is possible with just from measuring blood flow imagine what we could extrapolate from electrodes implanted deep in the brain.

devsda 3y ago

For now the system has to be trained per person. Is the difference in brain activity across individuals significant enough to stop building a universal model? It is not clear whether this is language dependent or not. If it is, I hope being bilingual or multilingual is a viable defense against this technology.

sjducb 3y ago
Obviously this is pure speculation, but I suspect it'll be a lot like cloning someone's voice. The first systems required the participant to read thousands of lines of text. Now you can do it over a phone call without the participant noticing that you're cloning their voice.
sycamoretrees 3y ago
Why would bilingualism be a defense? Try throwing ChatGPT or whatever a line which combines several languages. e.g., If you ask it “¿Quel est the resultado of 四*6.1, in inglese?”, it will probably reply “4 times 6.1 equals 24.4.” I suppose AI doesn’t think in words, but expects bits of information to be related to X meaning, and from there it can predict a reply and translate that information into words we understand. I haven’t tried the above line, but if it’s not possible already there’s nothing really stopping us from making it work soon enough. Edit: sorry, maybe I’m misunderstanding. Are you talking more about multilingual people thinking more abstractly, which would make it harder to tie information to any specific words?

6451937099 3y ago

[dead]

stolen_biscuit 3y ago

This is terrifying

Claude_Shannon 3y ago

So not even your mind would be safe. If true, everyone who took part in it should be tried as terrorists for crimes against humanity and never see the light again.

hungryforcodes 3y ago

“For a noninvasive method, this is a real leap forward compared to what’s been done before, which is typically single words or short sentences,” Huth said. “We’re getting the model to decode continuous language for extended periods of time with complicated ideas.” Thats pretty scary. Who would work on this? Refine this and in 10 years put it into wifi base stations that scan everything and you can read the thoughts of anyone in a room. Auto scan for "dangerous" keywords and voila: automated police state!

hnbad 3y ago
What people tend to forget about these dystopias is that dystopias are distributed unequally. For some people the police is already going to stop you randomly and may randomly end up killing you. Some people will already spend extensive time being searched and questioned if they want to take a flight. Some people will already be automatically rejected before anyone has actually read their qualifications or interviewed them. The US is already a police state. The police uses military grade equipment and vehicles. They can literally get away with murder in many cases. They can rob you in open daylight, legally. They can arrest you for no crime, detain you and then dump you in the middle of nowhere. They can shoot out your eyes by directly firing rubber bullets (which are supposed to be deflected off surfaces) straight on. And if you end up in prison, you can be forced into indentured servitude. Of course this is an exaggeration because all these things don't happen to all the people, but that's the point. Concerns about thought crime are just concerns that the apparatus could be aimed at you, too, when you've been less affected so far. The concern shouldn't be for whom it is aimed at but for the scope, scale and supposed necessity of apparatus itself. The problem isn't that we might oppress the wrong people, the problem is that we think we need oppression.
ErikBjare 3y ago
Good luck putting an fMRI machine in a wifi base station.
soco 3y ago
There's also an in-between status: put in the airports, police stations, tribunals, at the bank entrance, at wedding ceremonies or in churches... the fact that the scientist mentions their worries doesn't make any of that avoidable.

hnbad 3y ago

If this is trained to detect language in your brain, I wonder how this fares with people like me who lack a clear "inner voice" (or "inner monologue"). I don't doubt that it can be trained on a brain to detect that brain's patterns but given how different human brains can be in many ways, I'm inclined to believe this won't be turned into a "universal brain reader" so easily.

layer8 3y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33038452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33038452

cbolton 3y ago
Thanks, that one points to the bioRxiv version of the paper which is freely available while the news piece submitted here links to a paywall.